In 2007, a Canadian soldier stationed in Kandahar sent a letter to Maclean's magazine thanking the editors for the cover of their annual University Student Edition, which featured a young Canadian woman of Romanian descent, who had become the new pin-up girl for the soldier and his comrades. Headlines flashed "The Darling of Kandahar," inspiring Romanian-Canadian writer Felicia Mihali’s first novel in English.

Felicia Mihali is a journalist, novelist and publisher who lives in Montréal. After studies in French, Mandarin and Dutch, she specialized in Postcolonial literature at the University of Montreal, where she also studied History and English Literature. Her career was launched in 2002 with the novel Le Pays du fromage, highly praised by the media, shortly followed by six others books in French. In 2012, she published her first book in English, The Darling of Kandahar, inspired by a news item reported in Maclean’s magazine. Today, she writes in French and in English. She is the founder and president of Éditions Hashtag 2018 from Montréal.

Felicia Mihali's profile page

• Long-listed, Canada Reads Nomination